It’s Christmas Eve and Santa is off on his annual circumnavigation of the globe to deliver presents to 400 million Santa-believing children. It’s a feat of astonishing planning and coordination to prepare and submit 400,000 tons of presents, each individually specified, within a 31 hour deadline (including the Earth’s rotation) while surviving on a diet of biscuits.
That’s why Santa is the world’s greatest bid manager.
How does he do it? Well, firstly he spends most of December in shopping malls and garden centres building relationships, collecting client requirements and qualifying against the naughty/nice checklist – which he checks twice. Yes, Santa also invented Capture Management.
He has the world’s biggest and most successful elven bid team behind him, including an army of elf on the shelf account managers asking daily clarification questions about naughtiness. His market, customer, and competitor intelligence is second to none.
But, most impressive of all is Santa’s bid technology. He needs tech that can average 650 miles per second while also decelerating and accelerating 822 times per second for present drop offs. Luckily, he has access to flying reindeer and a magical sleigh capable of travelling at 3,000 times the speed of sound without instantly vaporising.
The problem for us non-magical bid professionals is there is no hypersonic technology capable of breaking the laws of physics to do all the tasks, track all the moving parts, and bring everything together on schedule. Not even AI.
What we have instead is a ho-ho-whole lot of choices (yes, I went there). There are software tools for automation, content management systems, AI-driven response generators, workflow integrations, CRMs with proposal features, and platforms claiming to do everything short of making you a gingerbread latte while you bid.
The market is full of over 200 bid-related tools competing for a slice of the proposal plum pudding, each with its own features, advantages, and limitations. But it’s not just a case of picking the flashiest features, it also needs to align with our organisational processes and our team’s unique needs, quirks, and strengths.
So, how do we find our perfect technology solution? Because it isn’t just the choice of tools, it’s having the awareness of what’s out there and how it fits our needs. The market is noisy, bustling, and full of promises of “AI-powered” widgets, but there’s no jolly Saint Nick to ask us what we want and promise to deliver it if we’re good.
But Christmas wishes sometimes do come true. All I want for Christmas is a simples way to go compare the best tools on the meerkat – I mean, market. A buffet from which we can choose pigs in blankets or Brussels sprouts and eggnog or mulled wine. And the Match & Compare software technology platform soon to be launched by Bid Solutions will provide just that.
It will be a gift to the profession that will have us walking in the air.
Darrell Woodward
Darrell Woodward is an award-winning consultant helping organisations unleash the full power of proposal automation to win more business faster. As a Bid Geek and coffee lover, he believes technology in bidding is about combining the right blend of content beans – compelling narratives, tailored solutions, and persuasive arguments – and the expertise of bidding baristas to craft the perfect proposal brew.
